‘Okay, then. What do you get out of it?’
He opened his mouth just as the door to the Die expelled a clot of punks, who paused against the empty storefront to smoke. Their heads were shaved or garishly dyed, and chains hung from their belts. In comparison, Eddie looked painfully conventional, and he paused with discomfort. Years ago, Klara might have felt sympathy for him – for anyone at all – but by now her sympathy had been exhausted. She turned and walked swiftly toward Twentieth Street.
‘When I was a kid,’ said Eddie, to her back, ‘I was a fiend for comic books. The Flash. The Atom. You name it. I’d see the Green Lantern when I looked at the sky. If I passed a fire, I knew it was Johnny Blaze. I thought my wristwatch was Jimmy Olsen’s; hell, I thought I was Jimmy Olsen. “Hallucinations,” my father said. “That’s what they are.” But they weren’t. They were dreams.’
Klara crossed her arms, hugging her jacket closer, but she stopped walking. She stared straight ahead as Eddie caught up and came around to face her.
‘Of course, I couldn’t say that to my pops,’ he said. ‘We’re talking real old-school Irish Catholic, labor union organizer, member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. “Do you hear me? Hallucinations,” he goes. “And I don’t wanna hear you say a word of it again.” “All right,” I said. And I didn’t. I went to Sacred Heart and I joined the force and I imagined I could still be like those guys. A hero, right? But I wasn’t like those guys. I was a man, or less than – a pig. I hated the kids and the gays and the burnt-out hippies, all the people who hadn’t worked as hard as I had and still had it better than I did. People, I thought, like your brother.’
She was crying. It took nothing to make her cry. Next month, it would be one year since she lay in bed with Simon and watched him inhale for the last time.
‘I was wrong,’ said Eddie. ‘When I watched you, making a card appear out of nowhere or working those steel rings, I remembered the comics. How it was possible to be more than you were – more than you started out being. I guess one way to put it is you gave me faith. Another is that I figured maybe I’m not too far gone yet.’
For seconds, Klara could not speak. Finally, unbeknownst to her, she had reminded someone of magic. She had given Eddie faith.
‘You’re not screwing with me, are you?’ she asked.
Eddie smiled, a childlike smile whose guilelessness made her cry harder.
‘Why would I do that?’ he said, and leaned forward, keeping his hands in his pockets, to kiss her.
She stilled at the shock of it. She’d been kissed plenty of times, but only now did she see how intimate the act really was. She had barely spoken to anyone since Simon’s death; usually, it was too painful to even see Robert. Inside her, a flock stirred and flew toward Eddie, desperately. But when he pulled back to smile at her, a smile of delight and good fortune, her desperation turned to revulsion. What would Simon think?
‘No,’ she said, quietly. Eddie’s hand appeared behind her neck to draw her closer, because he had not heard her or because he had decided to pretend as much, and she allowed herself to be kissed by him for seconds more. In doing so, she could pretend to be a different kind of person: someone who kissed a man because she liked him, not because it made her forget the hard ledge of rock from which she hung, clawing.
‘No,’ she repeated, and when Eddie still did not let go she shoved him in the sternum. He grunted and stumbled backward. A 26 trundled down Valencia, dispelling a haze of exhaust, and Klara started after it. By the time the gas cleared, Eddie stood alone beneath a street lamp, his mouth hanging open, and Klara was gone.
That fall, during the High Holy Days, she returned to New York for the third time. Klara and Varya chopped apples for kugel, Gertie cooking the noodles, while Daniel told stories of life in Chicago. Varya, twenty-seven, had finally moved into her own apartment. She had started graduate school at NYU, where she was studying molecular biology. Her focus was gene expression: she assisted a visiting professor in removing mutated genes from fast-growing organisms – bacteria and yeast, worms and fruit flies – to see if this altered their likelihood of disease. Eventually, she hoped to do the same in humans.
At night, Klara climbed into bed with Zoya, who had, in her old age, developed a queenly indisposition to walking anywhere. With the cat on her stomach and Varya in the opposite bunk, she asked to hear stories of Varya’s work. It gave Klara hope: the match-strike of genetic expression and the infinite variables that could be used to adjust eye color, predisposition to disease, even death. She had not felt so close to her siblings in years, and everyone, even Gertie, seemed lighter. When Gertie suggested the Golds perform the kaparot before Yom Kippur, in which a live chicken is swung above the head while reciting from the Mahzor – ‘Children of man who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,’ she intoned, ‘bound in misery and chains of iron’ – Klara burst into laughter; the charoset in her mouth splattered Daniel’s shirt.
‘That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard,’ she said.
‘What about the poor chicken?’ asked Daniel, flicking Klara’s chewed apple off with two fingers. Gertie’s indignation melted, and suddenly she was snorting, too – a miracle, it seemed to Klara, who had not heard her mother laugh in years.
Still, Klara could not explain to anyone what it meant for her to lose Simon. She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him. She had lost time, too, whole chunks of life that only Simon had witnessed: Mastering her first coin trick at eight, pulling quarters from Simon’s ears while he giggled. Nights when they crawled down the fire escape to go dancing in the hot, packed clubs of the Village – nights when she saw him looking at men, when he let her see him looking. The way his eyes shone when she said she’d go to San Francisco, like it was the greatest gift anyone had ever given him. Even at the end, when they argued about Adrian, he was her baby brother, her favorite person on earth. Drifting away from her.
At 72 Clinton, she lay in her old bed and closed her eyes until his presence was tangible. One hundred and thirty-five years ago, the Fox sisters heard rapping noises in their Hydesville bedroom. On a gray, blustery afternoon in September 1983, Simon knocked for Klara. It was more than a creak in the floorboards, more than the whine of a door: a low, sonorous pop that seemed to come from the bowels of 72 Clinton, as if the building were cracking its knuckles.
Klara’s eyes flew open. She could feel her heartbeat in her ears. ‘Simon?’ she ventured.
She held her breath. Nothing.